The more you walk, the better for your health

Published August 9, 2023, the study* analyzes the impact of walking on health in more than 220,000 healthy adults. In fact, it is a review study that took the results of 17 studies on walking and health together. This is called a meta-analysis. This is what came out. Anyone who takes fewer than 4,000 steps a day is not exactly living an active lifestyle. On the contrary, to science you are then a "sedentary person": you spend less than 10 percent of your daily energy consumption on (moderate) physical activity. You don't have to add many steps to that to already have a noticeable health effect: with 500 steps extra, you already have 7% less risk of dying prematurely from cardiovascular disease. If you take an extra 1,000 steps a day, your chances of survival already improve by 15%. The benefit continues to grow the more steps you take per day. What is new in this research is the observation that there is no upper limit: you get more benefits from 20,000 steps than from 10,000 steps a day, for example. How far this continues is not known, since there are hardly any people who take more than 20,000 steps a day.

It makes no difference whether you are young or old, male or female. Walking is a blessing for health.

*Maciej Banach et al. The association between daily step count and all-cause and cardiovascular mortality: a meta-analysis, European Journal of Preventive Cardiology, 2023 August 9th.